


Epilogue

by foundCarcosa



Category: Dragon Age
Genre: F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-05-28
Updated: 2012-05-28
Packaged: 2017-11-06 04:59:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 570
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/414946
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/foundCarcosa/pseuds/foundCarcosa
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dorian Hawke and Anders have defected from Kirkwall and left a war in their wake. All they want now is to rest.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Epilogue

The Fade warps and twists around her, voices becoming mangled and the ochre sky flushing lurid red. She hasn’t been in her own Fade, the dream-world of her own creation, since leaving Kirkwall. Instead there is this, generic playground of ghosts and demons, where she passes through unnoticed and unreal.  
She’d lost most of herself on the Gallows tiles, bleeding from more wounds than she could count. Afterward, she’d lost herself in valiant attempts to keep Anders’ nightmares at bay. Now she’s lost her grip on the Fade.  
There isn’t much more for her to lose.

“Justice is gone,” she hears from the Fade’s melting walls before she wakes up drenched in sweat colder than Orsino’s bleak stare just before the blood began running.  
“Justice is gone, and so am I.”

She fights the thin fur that covers her for a moment, throwing it back and reaching for… an Anders that is not there. The pallet is empty save for her.  
Her breath is rough on an already-ragged throat, fingers curling into claws and snagging on the dingy linen clothing in which she no longer recognises herself. She lurches to her feet and lunges for the barn door.

Early-morning fog billows lazily over the fields and over her feet, the dewy grass cool on her bare soles. She notices none of this, squinting into the hazy gloom with eyes that are thinly veiled with milky-white cataract.

Her dim gaze passes over the scarecrow until she realises that Anders is the scarecrow.  
Emaciated and swathed in the same sack-like clothing she was, straw hair limp and thinning, and not even those feral lyrium-blue eyes to cast his skeletal features in stark and terrifying relief.  
Anders watches the sun rise with no joy, no malice, not even a spark of interest. Chapped lips parted, his jaw hangs slack and his head lists just slightly to the right, and Dorian has a moment to think that even Sandal seemed more whole than he does at this moment.

When he sees her — although she can’t be sure of that, because his dead eyes do not move, nor do they flare to brilliant life the way they used to when he implored her to come to him, to illumine the darkest moments — his lips twitch, and she thinks he is trying to smile, or speak, or…

“Gave you a river of blood,” he whispers, “like I said I would,” and Dorian shivers at that long-ago memory.  
“No more we can do.”

“No—”

“I found home. Dorian. I found it. Now I'm tired and I want to rest.”

“Where— What—”

His eyes flick to her, finally, as the air expands and then explodes in a blast of searing-hot air.

It takes Dorian far too long to realise that he is ablaze, that he has set himself ablaze, but that is surely all right, because by the time she realises, she is burning too.  
No sweeter solace found, she thinks in those last moments, than this.

In the cities rebellion runs rampant, mage staff against templar sword, and somewhere in the Marches a dwarf looks out over the Waking Sea and wonders, and somewhere else another Chantry is succumbing to justice by fire. But somewhere deep in the Wilds, the sun rises shimmering and red, and the fog scuttles away, and in the green-grass field the father and mother of the Mage-Templar War burn unnoticed and unfound.


End file.
